Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(162)
Then he approaches the island. So close that she can smell him, so close that she can touch him, that she considers attacking him from below. Her hands grip the poker so tightly her knuckles whiten. If only she weren’t so weak.
There comes a thwack from above. So powerful that the island shakes around her. He has brought down the cleaver. She hears the meaty release of the blade when he lifts it. And then he brings it down again. And again. There is a ripping sound of wet fabric. And then something plops into a bowl. A ten-gallon trash can stands a few feet away. Into it Magog tosses the man’s head. The skull has been cleaved, the brain scraped from it.
The butchery continues for the next ten minutes. Him circling the island and slashing and peeling and tearing, the blade occasionally shrieking against bone. Blood oozes to the floor and pools in a puddle, and in it she can see the reflection of Magog raising and dropping the cleaver, like the terrible god of some tiny red planet. When the muscles in her back and legs begin to spasm and knot, she puts her hand in her mouth and bites down on it to get through the pain.
Somewhere in the kitchen an alarm chirps. Magog drops the cleaver with a clatter and walks to the oven and raspingly pulls from it three pans of meat, long thin strips browned to a crisp. From her hiding place she can smell the hellish breath of the oven—and she hates that it smells good, that her stomach gurgles with a hunger she wishes she could correct.
From one of the cupboards he lugs a Cuisinart. He snaps a shredder into place and punches the power and grinds the cooked meat against it until the container fills with flakes. What he is doing makes no sense to her. But none of this makes sense to her—the stacks of iodine, the old mansion, the harvested bodies—so that she wonders whether madness has finally seized her and she remains strapped to her basement bed, lost in some waking nightmare where the alien and ghastly behavior of her fellow lycans makes her question whether they really are men, as they like to claim, or merely beasts hidden in human robes.
The kitchen door swings open and she ducks back into her hole. She spots sneakers, jeans. “She’s escaped,” a voice says. Then, as quickly as he appeared, he is gone, followed by the booming footsteps of Magog.
They could return any second, she knows, but her muscles are in such a state of distress that she has no choice but to immediately slide out of the island and onto the floor, her body crabbed up. Slowly she straightens each leg and rubs hard at the muscles. She breathes through her teeth. It takes several minutes before she is able to hoist herself upright. She stares at the pile of meat and bones on the table, no longer recognizable as a man, a body unpuzzled. She doesn’t know whether to run or remain hidden. They are looking for her now, and if they find her, she doesn’t want to imagine what they will do to her.
There is a short hallway adjacent to the counter where Magog was working a moment before. She peers down it and spots a door with a square window that looks out onto an expansive lawn edged by hedges and rhododendrons. She sees—but it can’t be—a heifer, a sheep, and several goats grazing there. She thinks again that the alien logic of this place better suits a nightmare. A jacket hangs from a hook and she pulls it down and zips it around her nakedness before scrambling for the doorknob and pushing outside before she can second-guess the decision to run.
She does not look back. Looking back will not help. She keeps her eyes on the wall of rhododendrons ahead, narrows all of her attention on them so that the rest of the world falls away. Glossy green leaves, bright red explosions of flowers. If she can just get to them, if she can just cross these next twenty yards unopposed, she will be out of sight of the house. One step at a time, one decision at a time. First to the rhododendrons. Then to the ironwork fencing. Then to the woods beyond. One step leading to the next, every step crutched by the poker in her hand. She would run if she could, but the best she can do is hobble.
Her muscles scream. Her breath comes out of her throat in a wounded rasp. Her eyes water with tears of pain and fear and relief, making her vision uncertain, so that she at first can’t tell if the rhododendrons are shaking.
They are only ten paces away and she wants only to crash through them, the leaves like waxy knives, the blooms as big as fists battering her, a momentary discomfort, like the past few months, that she will grit her teeth through and endure and then emerge out the other side scratched and sticky with pollen, but alive. Then everything will be okay.
At last she is there—she has made it—and her body collapses into the tangle of branches, hidden, safe for now. She can go no farther, even though her legs stubbornly continue to jerk, as if she wants to keep walking.
She hears a rustling and snapping. She raises her head weakly. Twenty yards away, she sees a body push through the rhododendrons, stepping onto the lawn. And another. And another. All of them with shaved heads and American-flag T-shirts. They wear backpacks. They carry shotguns. They do not make sense. Like everything else. She tells herself that they are like the antique furniture and the dissected body and the goats grazing all around her—hallucinations—dreams she can dispel by pinching her skin and saying, wake up.
At first she believes they are hunting for her. No, she thinks. No. That wasn’t the deal. If she made it this far, she would be safe. She will not allow them to take her. She clutches the poker two-handed, ready to drive it into any who come near.
But they are already jogging away from her, toward the mansion, their backpacks jingling with ammo.